Since slashing construction fees for high-rise development in downtown, two towers have broken ground, including the $135 million 23-story project at One South Market. Hoping to spur more nearby development, the City Council on Tuesday will consider whether to vote in a similar half-off discount for buildings of any size as long as they create jobs. Other items on the agenda for the first council meeting of the 2013-114 fiscal year include another look at building restriction height around the airport, a potential study of the city’s sewer system and an update on the city’s graffiti abatement contract.

Mike Potter, husband of Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez, appears neither ready to forgive nor forget slights real and imagined in the lead-up to last week’s election. At last week’s Democratic Central Committee meeting, Potter blasted the Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce for its efforts to help defeat his wife, and/or support her opponent, Teresa Alvarado—perspective dictates the distinction. There’s just one issue with this indignation—Potter’s job as a state and governmental affairs rep for Cisco, one of the largest members of the local Chamber, requires him to work directly with the Chamber and its policy makers.

Small businesses increasingly have become the employers of many San Jose residents—including self-employed entrepreneurs—left behind in the tech boom. One way to address the yawning opportunity gap would focus our municipal energies on lightening the burdens of those small businesses. As we all know, City Hall can get in the way.

George Shirakawa Jr. once counted on Santa Clara County taxpayers and campaign contributors to be his benefactors, as he spent public money and campaign funds on luxury rental cars, gambling junkets, vacations and lavish dinners for staff and political allies. Now, it seems, high-profile developer John Vidovich has assumed the role of financier.

With an A-Team of lobbyists and legislators on the offensive against net metering and the startup solar industry, it would seem to be a case of David vs. Goliath. The good news for those of us on the side of sustainability is that David, or Steve Blank, has a game plan for how solar companies can fight back, claim their share of the market, and secure our energy future.

After voting to raise taxes on pot clubs earlier this year, San Jose Councilman Sam Liccardo has found a new vice to tackle: nudie bars. Spurred by the imminent opening of a gentlemen’s club in downtown, Liccardo has asked the city to impose more restrictions on San Jose’s adult establishments. The city already bans nudity in downtown businesses, which leaves us to presume that the Gold Club, slated to open up Aug. 8 in the historic 81 W. Santa Clara St. building, will operate as a bikini bar.

I applaud Congressman Michael Honda’s recent convening of the STEM Advisory Council, which I attended last Friday at Applied Materials with 60-plus engineers, educators, policy makers and non-profit leaders. We must act now, as more and more firms in the U.S., like Applied Materials, require science, technology, engineering or math degrees to satisfy their employment mandates.

Almaden Lake, one of the filthiest bodies of water in the Bay Area and possibly the state, is steeped in elemental mercury and polluted by blue-green algae blooms and bacteria from bird droppings. But how to clean up this community cesspool has raised a fair bit of controversy.

The company that provides Santa Clara County’s ambulance services is in need of rescue. In December 2010, the Board of Supervisors contracted with Rural Metro, which missed an important bond payment last week, leading industry insiders and county officials to worry that the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company may be headed towards bankruptcy. So what do the elected officials who supported the Rural Metro contract have to say about the current mess? Nothing.

Downtown San Jose appears poised to add a new entertainment venue next month. The question is whether some of the workers will be topless, fully nude or neither.

In the spring of 2012, I received notice of a conference in New York City called “Greater & Greener” that was to take place in July. The conference, which is wrapping up this year’s annual event today, covered a wide variety of topics all related to urban parks and trails.

Santa Clara Plays Fair has long been considered one of the South Bay’s preeminent NIMBY groups. Most sports economists consider the new 49ers football stadium in Santa Clara—set for completion in 2014—to be an excellent example of how private-public partnerships can create economic development while the city only puts some temporary skin in the game. Santa Clara Plays Fair disagrees, and the NIMBYs, ever allergic to planning and progress, appear unwilling to go gently into that good night. In what was probably intended to be a satirical cartoon posted on the group’s Facebook page, artist Eugenio Negro asks three rhetorical questions about the new stadium, each getting edgier until the third joke falls off the cliff.

We hear talk from time to time about partnerships between the public sector and private sector, essentially merging the mutual interests of governments, which serve communities, and private companies, which exist to make profits for shareholders or their private owners. But there is another entrant in the private sector that is often a partner but seems to get left out of the public/private partnership discussion: nonprofits. When it comes to parks, these organizations can make critical contributions.

Day two of the BART strike once again left commuters scrambling, the highways hopelessly jammed and countless people late for work.
 Go to 511.org for real-time updates and suggested ways around the hold-up, which has doubled or tripled commute times for a lot of people who work in and around San Francisco. Employees of the regional transit agency—the fifth most-used rail line in the nation—are on strike because contracts with the agency’s two biggest unions expired and discussions over a renewal fell apart. BART workers want higher wages—23 percent raises over the next four years.

A new survey recently commissioned by the William C. Velasquez Institute (WCVI) and supported by Californians Against Utilities Stopping Solar Energy (CAUSE) reveals some striking trends in key voting demographics in California and nationwide.

To handle the surge of complaints, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office set up a fraud hotline in Vietnamese and English for customers bilked by a San Jose travel agency. Sunlight Travel, founded in 1996 by Diane Ho, suddenly closed up shop June 5, leaving customers in a lurch. Many of them stand to lose thousands of dollars for flights bought but never booked. Sunlight Travel catered to a lot of Vietnamese clients from its now-closed strip mall storefront on South King Road.